We all know that customers and prospects are more in control of the buying conversation. Not that long ago, sales were almost exclusive achieved by us looking for strong sales hunters. Voice mail barriers, more informed buyers, and less time on everyone’s part has dramatically changed the sale process. In addition, sale reps are expensive. If we are honest with ourselves we know them to be poor prospectors. So now we are asking ourselves, “How can prospects find us better, and how do we engage them, qualify them and then move them into our sales reps’ “line of sight”? Marketing has evolved to how do we effectively use technology to nurture prospects and maintain a strong relationship with customers, especially, in an economy, where many of us have found it necessary to expand our focus nationally, if not globally. The promise of CRM is found in the name - Relationship Management. Yet few of us are in love with the results we have achieved from our CRM systems. I believe this lack of excitement with CRM, if not the outright failure of CRM can, in part, be attributed to two missing components: First – marketing has not stepped up to the plate and taken charge of CRM -- has not taken the responsibility for CRM away from IT and/or sales. After all, as marketers we are responsible for lead generation and customer retention. Who else is better positioned to manage the data? We should be the ones that are queuing up the sales teams and monitoring their activities. Second – Until now CRM has not provided us with the complete suite for building relationships – that drip / nurture marketing process. We have had to rely on individual tools, often not integrated with our CRM. Those days are over! There is a new product category - Marketing Automation. I invite you to comment on what you know about Marketing Automation. Are you using it? What are your current results? If not using, are you considering it? If so, why? Just put your fingers to the keyboard and let us know so we can help answer questions, concerns about how to effectively select a provider and use Marketing Automation in your organization.